Jesse Rodin

Form and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Music: Problems, Fallacies, New Directions

What did it mean to have a real-time experience of polyphonic music in the fifteenth century? Given a dearth of documentary evidence about listening practices and an abundance of through-composed works lacking in large-scale repetition, what can we say about how listeners heard musical ‘form’? To approach these questions this essay reasons by analogy with other artworks, contemporary descriptions of which can offer a model for talking about music. Focusing on mass settings by Du Fay and Josquin, the article imagines a kind of analytical discourse that must have orbited polyphonic works, while at the same time addressing head-on the evidentiary lacunae and methodological pitfalls that confront us today. The essay tells a story about what it meant for a certain kind of listener to hear music by Du Fay and Josquin, and proposes that our best hope of accessing fifteenth-century musical experiences lies in immersive engagement with the details of compositional practice.

Transformations in music theory and music treatises

This chapter discusses the evolution of the medieval beneficial system and its culmination in the fifteenth-century. It demonstrates how the system worked. The chapter also discusses the salutary effects of the system upon musicians, patrons, rulers, and the papacy, as well as ones understanding of music and musicians of that century. The fifteenth century saw the flowering of secular princely chapels, staffed with musicians adept at the performance, and frequently the composition, of sacred polyphony. The chapel served as the most visible emblem of political power and authority, impressing visiting diplomats, courtiers, and nobility with courtly civility and wealth represented by a sacred establishment highlighted by the performance of polyphony. The possession of one or more benefices served musicians as comfortable retirement plans, when it was time to end active service as a salaried member of a music chapel.

Making a motet: Josquin’s Ave Maria … virgo serena

The concept of the musical work is based on the assumption that a composed piece of music is a work of art. From a historical perspective, authorship stands as a comparatively recent determinant of the work concept. Imposing the concept of the work of art on music required the translation of the ars musicae from the context of the artes liberales into a more modern system of the arts. Around 1400 a new musical realm of experience emerged, and with it the idea that composed music was first and foremost a presentation of text to listeners, a concept introduced emphatically by Ciconia. A prerequisite for aesthetic discourse is the regular availability of music - or put differently, the reproducibility of a notated text and its sound; and it was written traditions that enabled composers to refer to each other and compare works through both reading and listening.